Alright, so continuing this saga..
I did the rears yesterday. Once again, it was a pretty straight-forward job.
I'd done them a few years ago. In fact, I know I did them in 2018...had a bit of a mix up at Autozone when I returned the retraction tool yesterday(I'll never again do rear brakes without using one, since I've spent 30 minutes fighting with them on other cars and the tool makes it a 5 minute job) and they could only pull up where I'd borrowed in in 2018 and not the one from last week.
In any case, the 2018 job was prompted when I was on the interstate one day, stopped to take a gas/bathroom break, and heard an awful scraping from the back of the car. I looked and sure enough the R-R rotor looked like someone had chucked it into a lathe but didn't know what they were doing and used a bad cutter. I was driving to my then-girlfriend(now wife's) house and when I got there, found the R-R pads down to metal. It was ugly, but I did pads and rotors. The caliper SEEMED fine, didn't have much corrosion, and retracted fine, so I cleaned and lubed the sliding pins and called it a day. I was also a bit cash short at the time(I know, bad excuse) and also was short on time and didn't want to deal with the amount of bleeding that usually comes with caliper replacement(even worse excuse). That was ~30K miles ago.
I hadn't really seen any issues since then so called it fixed, but when I pulled them yesterday I found that I had maybe 1/4" on the right pads while the left looked nearly new. So, it's caliper time. Again, excuses, but I needed the car yesterday so didn't get into that.
I'm noticing a slight but definitely there pull to the right, so I'm GOING to do calipers. I can park the car for the next couple of days, or at least drive the MG when needed. At this point, I have 30 or so miles on the new brakes, so I'm not super worried about having damaged/cooked the new pads.
I'm planning on grabbing bracketed calipers just to be safe, but is there any compelling reason to grab Motorcraft on these vs. Autozone?